HTC 10 goes official

HTC has finally released their 2016 flagship, HTC 10. It tries to stand up from the competition with great software and good camera.

HTC 10 was leaked and teased for a while but now it goes official. The design is just like in the leaks, a premium metal chassis with huge chamfered edges. Gone are the Boomsound speakers and a fingerprint scanner is replacing the lower speaker. The scanner also acts as a home button and there are two capacitive navigation buttons on each side of it.

The 12 “ultrapixel” camera is a little protruding even though the device is quite thick for 2016 at 9mm. The front facing camera is 5 “ultrapixels” and has its own OIS for steady selfies. The front facing speaker grill is still mentioned to provide excellent quality and it’s joined by another speaker at the bottom of the device next to the Quick Charge 3.0 certified USB Type-C port.

The 5.2″ display is still LCD but HTC calls it Super LCD5. The resolution is QHD 1440p with 565PPI. Under the bonnet, the HTC 10 has the typical 2016 flagship hardware. The Snapdragon 820 is joined by 4GB of RAM and 32 or 64GB of storage with microSD support for up to 2TB cards. The battery capacity is pretty lame for the 9mm thickness, 3000mAh.

The camera is said to be the best smartphone camera out there. It’s much said with HTC’s record of bad smartphone cameras over the years. The pixel size is 1.55µm, aperture is 1.8 and the whole thing is optically stabilized. The camera also records 4K video with 24-bit sound. Tests will show how good the camera really is.

This year HTC has some good news about their software. They have got rid of all the duplicate apps like browser, calendar and calculator apps and the phone only ships with Google apps. The HTC Sense is still very present in everywhere but luckily it has always been one of the fastest UIs out there and HTC has been good at updating their phones despite the skin.

The HTC 10 will be available in three colors, gray, silver and gold. Preorders were supposed to start already but at least we can’t get through. Price is $699 but the page doesn’t tell for witch model, 32 or 64GB. It sounds quite steep for 32GB model.